Looking at the comments here, am I alone in being completely unaware of famous users here? While browsing HN I pay zero attention to the users and simply look at the content or comments.
I’d be curious whether people here would like more/less awareness of usernames. I suppose I’ll find out if my comments on it get any reactions.
It's harder to keep track of diYsj5;£ and diYaba36£- versus benj111 and ctack.
I suppose the current model follows the way actual human discourse works. We can identify people but they don't have a karma score over their head. Annonymising everything would be breaking that. It might work sure. But it feels like changing something that already works.
Plus, in a threaded forum, you're always replying either as a child to one specific commenter or to the main thread anyway, which adds greater context. IDs could be generated locally for each user and applied only to other users commenting to them. The site could even highlight which comments belong to which users. There are multiple ways this can be done.
>I suppose the current model follows the way actual human discourse works.
It doesn't, and it isn't intended to. Normal human discourse is noisy, repetitive and emotive, and isn't graded on quality, brevity and uniqueness as it is here. The goal here is signal over noise. Identity is noise most of the time, so it should be eliminated, or at least reduced as much as possible.
>But it feels like changing something that already works.
Just because something works doesn't mean it can't be improved upon. Hacker News isn't perfect. Given the amount of effort put into minimizing the UI here, reducing contrast and the number of links on a page, all in the service of minimizing distraction from the information itself, why not also eliminate usernames? What value does the specific string "krapp" bring to this conversation? or "benj111?" None, beyond providing a link to a profile which is empty more often than not, and a way to keep track of identifiers. None of that requires specific identities.
True. It only implies that it could be broken.
You may not see the value in usernames, but that doesn't mean there is none. It's a variant of Chesterton's fence: if you do not understand the value of something for its users, don't mess with it.
Since I've been here, numerous extra links have been added to the comment headers (prev, next, context,) hiding comments was added, vouching was added making hellbanning reversible, thread folding was added, two new pages were added to the header, the repost pool was made public, submitted links now automatically search for canonical URLs and titles are automatically edited. And before that, user karma was made invisible in threads. And that's just the stuff I remember or noticed. And the site hasn't broken yet.
Removing usernames could break things, but I can think of a number of problems it could also improve. Even just generally reducing engagement and thread velocity across the board would increase quality in aggregate. At the very least, it might be worth beta testing. If it doesn't work it can always be reverted.
My pc-at-home view is very different to my android 'materalistic' (app) view.
I rarely care about the username, though for the longest time i didn't spot/ think/ know about 'dang', actually being 'dan g'.
Would it alter the zeitgeist subtly or dramatically? Most noticeable to the more social or less social people? Here in Konishi polis.
If anyone wants a quick, nice pop-up on mouse-over, there is 'Refinded Hacker News' plugin for Chrome and FF: https://github.com/plibither8/refined-hacker-news
However, people-oriented media are unbearable for me. LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook.. All are full of people who want to build a reputation, and even though everything about them are different superficially, they all feel very similar.
On one extreme there's Instagram where that's the main currency, but even on Twitter (which is supposedly about what you write), where you just have the one profile photo/maybe occasional other pictures, you can see it draw disproportionate attention and skew content. Naturally Twitter then inserts these accounts that draw lots of engagement into the feeds of everyone else so they're not possible to easily avoid.
dang (obviously), WalterBright (D, C++), pc (Stripe), steveklabnik (Rust), antirez (Redis), jedberg (Reddit), gwern (gwern!), burntsushi (rg), patio11, fossuser, kube-system, api, sillysaurusx, smoldesu, dragontamer, ethbr0, and our favorite, hnthrow(away)?.*
My experience is generally the same. I read for content. If I’m interested, I might click a profile link to see how long user has been on the site or if they have a personal site.
Thanks for putting this together, interesting to see the links of HNer's with a lot of karma.
Lots of other good suggestions as to what to do with this dataset, but I think it'd be fun to see a collection of the highest ranked comments by each user, perhaps with a minimum length. It'd be a way to get a collection of well thought out "essays" on different topics by use.
We all have a scarcity of time on this planet, and I'm convinced that it's the duty of the excellent to (to quote William and Theodore from the 80s movie) "be excellent".
Very different to other forums I use. Fine with me.
And myself of course.
That's about all I could come up with on the spot.